Reviews
Bernard Hughes
To St James’s Piccadilly to hear the young pianist Misha Kaploukhii give an impressive performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, accompanied by the Greenwich Chamber Orchestra. Kaploukhii is a rising star, a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music where he recently won the Concerto Competition, and I enjoyed his reading of a favourite concerto of mine.And although he isn’t yet the finished article – as I’m sure he himself would admit – he is certainly a pianist I will be keeping my eye on. The Fourth Concerto starts with a Beethovenian novelty, the piano alone playing a chordal Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Issued in September 1974, Hall of the Mountain Grill was Hawkwind’s fifth LP. The follow-up to 1973’s live double album The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London, it found the band in a position which seemed unlikely considering their roots in, and continued commitment to, West London’s freak scene. Their June 1972 single “Silver Machine” had charted and, irrespective of what they represented or espoused, Hawkwind had breached the mainstream.Nonetheless, Hall of the Mountain Grill didn’t chart high – in the UK, it peaked at 16 in late September 1974: when Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Back in 2003, when Mick Herron was a humble sub-editor, his debut novel was published, the first of what became a four-volume series, the Zoë Boehm thrillers. Inevitably, after the success of his later Slow Horses series, television has snaffled this character up too. Morwenna Banks works on both series as a writer-producer. And it shows.Part of the fun of Down Cemetery Road is that it’s almost a distaff version of Slow Horses, with an atmospheric theme song with pertinent lyrics over the credits, Michelle Gurevich’s “Woman’s Touch”, great dialogue and a top-flight cast who know how to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If the distance from Festen to The Railway Children looks like a long stretch of track, remember that Mark-Anthony Turnage’s operas have often thundered through the drama of shattered families mired in mystery and secrecy – all the way back to the Oedipal conflicts of Greek in 1988.Now, in the the same year as a Covent Garden triumph with his version of the dysfunctional dynasty of Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish film, the composer returns with a project he first conceived during the 2020 lockdown with librettist/partner Rachael Hewer. The pair have updated Edith Nesbit’s adored 1906 Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Robin Holloway is a composer and, until his retirement in 2011, don at Cambridge, where he taught many of the leading British composers of the last half-century. He has also always written on music, including a long-standing column in The Spectator, previously publishing two collections of “essays and diversions” (which I confess I haven’t read).Now comes his summa, Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music, styled as “an invitation to western classical music”. The first thing to say is: it’s very long. Indeed, the proof copy of 1,216 pages didn’t fit through my letterbox Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
On paper, this RSC revival of Ella Hickson’s 2013 adaptation sounds just the ticket: a feminist spin on the familiar JM Barrie story, with a gorgeous set, lots of wire work and all graced with the orotund tones of Toby Stephens as Captain Hook. In action, this mix doesn’t work as well as you want it to.I decided fairly quickly that I didn’t really know who the piece was for. The RSC gave us Matilda so it has previous in devising superior entertainment that older children can enjoy, their accompanying adults too. But here the younger part of the audience seem to be the prime concern, with a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“How can you tell she’s an alien?” asks Don (Aidan Delbis, an impressive neuro-divergent actor) of his cousin Teddy (the excellent Jesse Plemons).Yurgos Lanthimos’s gripping black comedy Bugonia (nothing to do with begonias, by the way, but a Greek word concerning bees’ ability to spontaneously generate from a cow’s carcass) is marvellously deranged, taking a conspiracy theory to its logical, or illogical, conclusion. The screenplay is adapted by Will Tracy (Succession; The Menu; The Regime) from Jang Joon-hwan’s film Save the Green Planet!. And Robbie Ryan’s cinematography using large-format Read more ...
Bill Knight
Photo Oxford 2025 presents a programme of exhibitions, lectures and events ranging from well-known artists and documentary photographers to new talent, spread over the town at 26 venues in colleges, galleries and bookshops. In a way this is reminiscent of the rencontres de la photographie at Arles. Unlike at Arles however, admission is free and the weather is less sunny.This year’s festival takes as its theme the relationship between truth and photography and includes artists who use artificial intelligence to create their images. Given the difficulty in agreeing on a definition of Read more ...
Gilbert & George, 21st Century Pictures, Hayward Gallery review - brash, bright and not so beautiful
Sarah Kent
There was a time when Gilbert & George made provocative pictures that probed the body politic for sore points that others preferred to ignore. Trawling the streets of East London, where they’ve lived since the 1960s, the artist duo chronicled the poverty and squalor of their neighbourhood in large photographic panels that feature the angry, the debased and the destitute.
Scrawled on decaying walls, the racist, sexist and homophobic slogans they recorded on their wanderings, create an atmosphere of dread – of impending and actual violence. The streets were mean and, especially as gay men Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...
Robert Beale
You have to admire Samantha Fernando’s concept of the “To Do” list. Hers has one item: “Do Less”. That’s the subtitle of one section of the new work, Wintering, for which she wrote both words and music.It was heard for the first time in the North of England last night in a concert by four voices of the Marian Consort and a Manchester Collective string quartet (the premiere was at the Wigmore Hall last week).Oddly enough, there’s nothing about winter in the evocation of a guided meditation, with a soprano voice speaking the random thoughts actually going on in the head of a participant, which Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's not easy witnessing your own death. But that's the situation in which we find the lyricist Lorenz Hart at the start of Blue Moon, Richard Linklater's startling film about a creative maverick who is well aware that his own shining star is on the wane. Boasting longtime Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke in his finest screen performance since this same director's Boyhood, the movie casts an unsparing glance at a great talent run amok even as it offers Hawke a renewed shot at the Oscar that has so far eluded him. (Hawke's last nomination, in fact, was for Boyhood 11 years ago.) Read more ...